Boxes of single-doses vials of the measles-mumps-rubella virus vaccine live, or MMR vaccine and ProQuad vaccine are kept frozen inside a freezer at...more

Boxes of single-doses vials of the measles-mumps-rubella virus vaccine live, or MMR vaccine and ProQuad vaccine are kept frozen inside a freezer at the practice of Dr. Charles Goodman in Northridge, Calif., Thursday, Jan. 29, 2015. Some doctors are adamant about not accepting patients who don't believe in vaccinations, with some saying they don't want to be responsible for someone's death from an illness that was preventable. Others warn that refusing treatment to such people will just send them into the arms of quacks. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

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Pediatrician Charles Goodman vaccinates 1 year- old Cameron Fierro with the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, or MMR vaccine at his practice in...more

Skepticism about the health effects of vaccines on children is evenly distributed among Canadians of all demographics, with no significant patterns of gender, age, income or education, according to an unusual survey that tried to cast a sociological eye on "anti-vaxxers."

"There's no profile for these individuals... It's everybody. It's you and me," said Quito Maggi, president of polling firm Mainstreet Technologies, which did the survey. "It could be your neighbour. That's the scary thing. Without asking someone, without asking other parents at your kids' schools or asking people at your daycare, you're not really going to know."

If anything, there is a slight bias toward highly educated people, which fits with the impression that people who refuse to vaccinate their children do not lack access to scientific information so much as reject it on various grounds.

Other than that, the only obvious trends to emerge are that a clear majority of two thirds of anti-vaxxers do it for "health concerns," a smaller contingent of 19% do it for religious reasons, and 8% do it for philosophical reasons.

Mr. Maggi describes this research as "raw data," a survey rather than a proper poll, because without a clear sense of how many anti-vaxxers there are in Canada, it is not possible to say how representative a poll would be. It took about 10,000 random calls to get 1,013 people who said they do not believe in vaccinating their children.

The demographics of anti-vaxxers align pretty closely with Canadians at large, the survey suggests. Four in ten, for example, come from households with over $100,000 in annual income. Roughly the same portion has a university degree, which is slightly higher than the general population.

"There's nothing to indicate what factors make people choose not to vaccinate their children," Mr. Maggi said.

A recent measles outbreak in Ontario, which peaked shortly before the survey was conducted late last month, did not seem to have any effect at all on people's beliefs, with four in five anti-vaxxers saying they were "not at all likely" to change their position in response to the outbreak.

Mr. Maggi said part of this could be that some are parents of children who are already teenagers and out of the perceived danger zone for diseases like measles. Mostly, though, it illustrates how deeply held and unshakeable the anti-vaccine view is.

Vaccine opponents have received intense attention recently, due in large part to a major outbreak of measles in the U.S., the smaller one in Canada, and other evidence that preventable diseases are still in circulation, even those like measles that were once officially declared eradicated in both countries.

Part of the blame for these outbreaks is thought to lie with parents who refuse to vaccinate their children, sometimes because of the debunked fear that vaccines cause autism or mercury poisoning or auto-immune disorders. Other times the reasons are murkier and more complex, involving some kind of philosophical naturalism, religious prohibition, or skepticism about pharmaceutical research, government funded science, or public health policy.

Simple ignorance is rarely the key issue, the survey suggests. Two thirds of anti-vaxxers, for example, have completed some post-secondary education.

Sometimes anti-vaxxers pursue competing therapies to guard against disease, such as deliberate infection at so-called "pox parties" and "flu flings," or by using nosodes, the highly diluted homeopathic version of vaccines, for which there is no scientific evidence about the mechanism by which they are supposed to work.

Other times, vaccines are simply avoided in their own right, often with no adverse consequences, which is known in epidemiology as the "free rider" phenomenon. In some rare cases - 2% in the survey - people simply do not know why they refuse, but they still do, against medical advice, which says that all children, with rare exceptions, should be fully immunized.

"I think that that's just reflective of this issue in general, in terms of the education to the general public. If you just do a simple Google search for 'don't vaccinate your kids,' there's lots of websites out there, there are lots of views that purport to debunk the benefits of vaccination. There's lots of even celebrities who are out there saying 'Don't vaccinate your children.' I think people hear that and they think, you know, well, this must be true," Mr. Maggi said. "The Internet is both a great thing and a terrible thing at the same time, in that way. A lot of these websites do look very legitimate and have legitimate-seeming studies that are quoted. So people just believe that information."